Thursday, November 29, 2012

"Where the living relax among the dead"

This article from an African news aggregator popped up in my special "Librarian of the Dead" section in Google News. It's an opinion piece someone wrote about a cemetery in Aberdeen, Scotland. It's not exactly well-written, but it thankfully says something many cemetery enthusiasts, myself included, have been saying for a long, long time.

The truth is, most cemeteries designed after about the 1800's were meant to be used not just as a place to visit the dead, but for recreational purposes. As we would use our parks. Père Lachaise in Paris was I believe the first cemetery to do this in 1804, and U.S. cemeteries eventually followed suit. If you think about the landscape of those kinds of cemeteries you start to see what I mean. Of course, not many people these days would think to fly a kite and have a picnic lunch at the local cemetery, but it used to be more common many years ago. It would make me happy for trends to swing back that way someday.